Add It to the List...

... of reasons I became a teacher.

Today was my first day teaching the other 8th grade class -- just 3 boys in the class, and one was sick today. They picked up the Review Baseball idea really well and got started with problems. One of the problems was something like the following:

A 15-foot ladder is resting against a building so that the base of the ladder is 9 feet away from the base of the building, and the top of the ladder is resting against the wall 1 foot from the top of the building. The bottom of the ladder needs to move how many feet closer to the building so that the ladder will reach the top?

(It was worded better than that, and had a picture to go with it. Nice application of the Pythagorean Theorem -- twice, even.)

When my cooperating teacher takes notes while watching me teach, she's often found that just as she's noted something down, I do something to address what she was writing about. Instead of deleting the comment, she uses strike-through on the font, then adds what I did to make her prior comment irrelevant. This was one such situation.

The two boys had gotten through figuring out that the "missing leg" on the right triangle (in other words, how far up the building wall the top of the ladder was resting) was 12 feet, and were struggling a little to figure out what else they had to do. My coop. teacher was noting that maybe I'd need to explain the question in sign, because she didn't think they were really understanding what was happening.

At that moment, one of the boys started signing animatedly at the other and picked up his whiteboard slate. At first I didn't know what he was saying, because I couldn't see him well at that angle; the second boy looked to me for help instead just as I realized what the first boy was doing, and so I told him to look back at his classmate and watch what he was explaining.

He was using his left forearm to represent the wall of the building, and the slate to represent the ladder. He showed the slate leaning against his arm, with his fingertips poking above the edge of the slate, signing something along the lines of, "See, it's here, and it's 9 feet from here to here, and 12 feet here, but there's still 1 foot up here. If I slide the 'ladder' so the top's here, see the distance down here is less, so we have to find out how much less it is."

It was a beautiful moment, *especially* since the boy who clearly had a firm grasp on the problem is the one who sometimes lags behind. He's apparently really been picking things up since January, no longer relying on the excuse he used last year, that he was really a year younger than the other kids. And he wasn't even feeling well today! (Later in class, he said he was feeling dizzy, and my coop. teacher agreed that he looked pale, so we sent him to the infirmary -- he'll be fine.)

In all, it was a good day -- and there are only two more days this week! (Friday off -- thank goodness!)